


maquette

by oryx



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 16:27:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1948089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oryx/pseuds/oryx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight-year-old Huan finds his passion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	maquette

One afternoon, his mother rounds up the entire family to go on a walk through the park. (“Exercise brings inspiration” she always says, in that singsong tone of voice.) As they near a bend in the path Opal stops and tugs on his sleeve and says “look, Huan, look,” wide-eyed with wonder, and he can’t help but follow her gaze. There’s a man with an easel and a canvas standing by the pond, staring out at the water thoughtfully. Huan watches as the man picks up a paintbrush. As he begins to paint in broad, sweeping strokes, forming the outline of the pond and the tree by its bank and the bridge in the distance. As the empty white canvas is slowly filled with colour – greens for the reeds and lilypads, greys for the bridge, soft oranges for the dying afternoon light.

 

“So pretty,” Opal says, a broad smile dimpling her cheeks, and Huan wonders what it might be like, to create something beautiful from something plain. To take a blank surface and make into something that people would stop to admire.

 

“Yeah,” he murmurs, and finds himself smiling, too, a strange kind of excitement settling warm in his chest. “It is pretty, isn’t it?”

 

.

 

.

 

Painting, it turns out, is a great deal harder than the man in the park made it look. He ends up with a crumpled stack of rejects before he manages anything that looks even vaguely like its subject. The end result is an awkward, drippy watercolour of the flowers in the courtyard garden, greens and purples blurring together into a brownish mess. The colours are all so flat and dull, he thinks. It’s not right at all. He lays there on the floor, chin in his hands, frowning at it in annoyance (as if that might make it look better).

 

“What’re you up to, kid?” a voice asks. He cranes his neck to find Grandmother peering down at him.

 

“…Painting,” he says.

 

“Painting?” she echoes. “Huh. Didn’t know you were into that. Thought you were all about writing?”

 

“That’s old news, Grandma,” he scoffs. “There wasn’t any future for me in the literary world. Art is my calling now.”

 

“No future for…?” Her surprised expression quickly fades away into one of barely-concealed amusement. “Right, right. Of course. Deciding your whole life at age eight, huh? That’s some foresight you’ve got there.” She reaches down to ruffle his hair. “Well, keep it up. Glad _someone_ knows what they’re doing around here.”

 

“Gr-grandma!” Huan huffs, hurriedly flattening his hair with his hands. “I told you not to do that! It takes a while to get it to look like this, okay? And your hands are always dirty!”

 

Grandmother blinks down at him.

 

“Incredible,” she mutters, shaking her head exasperatedly. She tilts her head up to the sky as if pleading with the spirits to grant her patience. “The only kid I’ve ever known who couldn’t handle a bit of dirt – my own grandson. Where did I go wrong?” She sighs and casually steps over him, lifting a hand in parting as she walks away. “If your mom asks, I’m out for tea with a friend,” she calls over her shoulder. (Judging by the number of times a week she goes out for “tea with a friend,” Huan has begun to suspect that it might be a cover story. For what, he has yet to work out.)

 

“W-wait, Grandmother,” Huan says. She turns around with a ‘hmm?’ and he holds up his watercolour. “Do you think… my painting’s any good?”

 

They stare at each other for a moment. Or, to be more accurate: Huan stares at her, and Grandmother looks somewhere just to the left of him. The realization of what he just said hits him like a slap in the face. Embarrassment burns the back of his neck, and he’s on the verge of stammering out an apology.

 

But then Grandmother begins to laugh – loud and raucous, a flash of white teeth, eyes crinkling around the edges. “That’s a good one, kid,” she says. “I was wondering if you’d ever find a sense of humor.”

 

And then she turns away, still cackling madly to herself, and continues on down the porch until she vanishes from sight.

 

.

 

.

 

It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that Grandmother is blind.

 

She always knows it’s him when he enters a room. “I just feel your footsteps,” she’d explained once, nonchalant. “Your brothers’ are louder and more intense. They can be tough to tell apart, honestly, but then I just listen for their voices and that usually clears that up. Yours are lighter. More… thoughtful, somehow? It’s a hard feeling to put into words. And your sister might as well be a baby turtleduck with how soft her footsteps are.” Grandmother had smiled wide, then. “No wonder she’s not showing any signs of earthbending. Too light on her feet for it.”

 

But there are other, more inexplicable things, too – times when he’ll roll his eyes at his mother, and Grandmother will chuckle as if she could see it plain as day. Times when they’ll play hide and seek, and she’ll find them easily no matter where they hide – in the high-up branches of the old plum tree, or in the linen closet surrounded by blankets, places where her feet shouldn’t be able to see.

 

“I think Grandma’s magic,” Wei whispers one day, and Wing nods enthusiastically.

 

“Don’t be stupid,” Huan says, but later, when she changes the radio to the correct station in a manner of seconds, he can’t help but wonder if they might, in fact, be right.

 

.

 

.

 

Painting, he decides, is simply not the medium to fully express his lofty artistic ideals. A two-dimensional surface can only convey so much, after all. True art must be felt! …At least, that’s what the book he got from the library says. _The Physicality of Sculpture and the Self_ by Gao Touzen. (“Isn’t this a little heavy for you?” the librarian had asked, giving him that annoying little Adult Smile, and he’d scowled at her so intensely that Father had felt the need to “apologize on his behalf.”)

 

And the true potential of sculpture, Touzen says, can only be unlocked through earthbending.

 

It’s a slow process, at first. He starts small despite his impatience, forming bits of clay into hearts and stars and flowers. Things he’s made before, in moments of boredom, but now he pours all his effort into, making sure their edges and angles are exact. From there he moves on to animals – a hogmonkey, a koalaotter (which he’s seen only in picture books), the armadillo lion he saw at the zoo. Earthbending is not precise by nature. Earthbending is strong and sudden like an earthquake, bold and powerful like the continents shifting, leveling mountains and raising entire cities in their place. Or so he was taught. But the longer he works his hands over the tiny bits of clay the easier it becomes, channeling power through the very tips of his fingers to shape the most miniscule details.

 

After weeks of practice he finds himself with a handful of pieces he’s proud of, including a badger mole and a dragon moose, its appearance half-remembered from last year’s vacation to the Fire Nation.

 

“Did you make these, Huan?” his mother asks, eyes wide in astonishment. She bends down next to the table, hand hovering over the sculptures, as if she doesn’t dare to touch. “Oh, sweetheart. They’re amazing!”

 

“…I guess,” he mutters, and shrugs. Mother thinks everything he does is “amazing,” even when it’s plainly not.

 

Later, he sneaks out of bed and tiptoes his way to the porch outside Grandmother’s room, where she likes to sit, toes curled in the dirt of the garden, before turning in for the night.

 

“A little late for the young’uns to be up, isn’t it?” she says as he approaches, then grins and pats the spot next to her. “What’s on your mind, kid?”

 

“I…” He licks his lips nervously. “I made something for you. Here.”

 

He shoves the badger mole sculpture towards her, and she takes it from him after a moment of surprise. She turns it over in her hands, fingertips brushing over the head, the feet, the tail, digging into every groove and tracing every contour.

 

“…Did you make this, Huan?” she asks finally. Her voice is oddly quiet.

 

“Y-yeah,” he says. “Do you… like it?”

 

A faint, wistful smile crosses her lips. “Yeah, I do,” she says. “I really do. That’s some talent you’ve got. Being able to make something like this at your age. You have any more of these?”

 

“Yes!” Huan exclaims. “Yes, I’ve got a dragon moose, and an iguana seal, and a koalaotter – ”

 

“A koalaotter? Really? I’ve… never seen one of those before.”

 

“You’ve never seen anything, Grandma,” Huan says, rolling his eyes, and Grandmother laughs out loud. She reaches over and pinches his cheek hard enough that he yelps.

 

“You know what I mean, brat. You think… you could bring the other ones over here?” She clears her throat awkwardly. “For curiosity’s sake, I mean.”

 

Huan nods excitedly and says “be right back,” jumping to his feet and scrambling down the hall to his room as quietly as possible. When he returns, arms laden with the majority of his sculptures, he lays them all out on the porch next to Grandmother, then grabs her hand and moves it to the koalaotter first. She picks it up with a soft smile.

 

“So that’s what it looks like,” she murmurs, hands moving over the clay surface, and Huan can’t help but grin.

 

 _Touzen was right_ , he thinks, with a hint of smug satisfaction.

 

Sculpture is by far the most “profound and cultured of all the artforms."


End file.
